PILOT error was yesterday blamed for killing all 228 people on board an Air France passenger jet that plunged into the Atlantic.

Investigators revealed the rookie co-pilot reacted wrongly when the aircraft stalled in a tropical storm.

They said Cedric Bonin, 32 — youngest and least experienced member of the three-man crew — incorrectly pointed the jet’s nose up when it should have been down.

And they recommended all pilots now receive compulsory training in how to fly manually in order to handle a stall at high altitude. The doomed Airbus 330 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris fell 38,000ft after stalling in a thunderstorm. Among the dead were five British and three Irish passengers.

They included Alexander Bjoroy, 11, a boarder at Bristol’s £5,970-a-term Clifton College who had been spending half-term with his South-American based parents.

Another was Dr Eithne Walls, 28, from Ballygowan, Co Down, who had starred in Riverdance on Broadway. The French air accident investigation agency, BEA, said the captain was on a break when warnings were first sounded.

But there was “no evidence of task sharing” among his two co-pilots, neither of whom was trained to fly manually or at high altitudes.

The report on Air France’s worst ever disaster in 2009 was based on black box recordings which were only recently recovered.

It also said passengers were never told what was happening as Flight 447 dived for three-and-a-half minutes before hitting the sea.